Quote of the Week

When I moved to Atlanta I was made aware of a peculiar pastime of the city’s white frat boy elite. They apparently enjoy getting drunk and visiting one of the city’s many legendary black strip clubs rather than the white strip clubs. The fun part of this ritual seems to be rooted in the peculiarity of black female bodies, their athleticism and how hard they are willing to work for less money as opposed to the more normative white strippers who expect higher wages in exchange for just looking pretty naked. There are similar racialized patterns in porn actresses’ pay and, I suspect, all manner of sex workers. The black strip clubs are a bargain good time because the value of black sexuality is discounted relative to the acceptability of black women as legitimate partners.

Condemning oppressive clients only when they are bad customers of paid sex is missing the point—or do you think that they don’t treat other workers the same way when they can get away with it? Wouldn’t an abusive, bullying porn director be an abusive, bullying grocery store manager? I’ve been talked down to and pushed to the point of injury on a porn set and while working food service. Why do you care if I was hurt in the hands or in the vagina? My pain was pain either way.

-thewhorepoet demonstrates yet again how much brilliance can be found on the sex worker tumblrsphere by emphasizing that it’s about labor rights, dummy.

People sometimes assume that sex workers lie about their profession because they feel ashamed of it. This is not true for most sex workers. Instead they hide what they do from anyone who might hurt them because of it.

I won’t fund my use dishonestly. I promised myself that. If I can’t fund it thru work, I don’t use. This is the thing—no one sees sex work as a way junkies can use honestly. They just see it as a problem.

—KC with some real talk on her tumblr

(Please use the comments section to shamelessly self-promote your blog or tumblblog, so we can include it in our survey of the sex worker blogosphere when choosing the Quote of the Week.)

I called my friend Amy and told her I feel trapped, and that I don’t think I can live my life if it’s just going to keep cycling back to having no options. And she was kind enough not to tell me why sex work is awesome, or to question my commitment to the movement, or to question whether I could really feel this bad about it. There is something really crazy-making about trying to pretend my feelings about sex work don’t matter, about continually tying the right of decriminalization to the obligation to be happy, when doing sex work makes me desperately unhappy.

…In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed traces the rise of happiness as a personal and cultural obligation. Happiness is “the good life,” and good people are the ones that make themselves and others happy. But we live in a world in which some people’s “good life” is necessarily dependent on others’ exploitation. The obligation to be happy, for Ahmed, is the obligation to let that continue. The history of unhappiness in the 20th century – as it has been told and recorded, in literature, memoirs and other archives – has been the history of resistance.

I’m not sure precisely what a sex positive feminist theory of prostitution that embraces unhappiness looks like, or could look like. But I’m tired of only ever seeing my feelings about sex work represented in abolitionist writing that doesn’t reflect my politics (or my basic need for survival, thanks bitches).